I wa’n’t goin’ to stand for that. I don’t pretend I ever felt like Mr. Lincoln did about niggers. No, sir, I was a Democrat, and I wanted the South let alone. I didn’t want to hear no abolition talk. But I was dead agin’ havin’ any more slaves than we could help, and what’s more I wa’n’t myself willin’ to live in a state where they was. I’d seen enough for that. Back in the ’40’s, when I first started up this store, I used to go to New Orleans for my goods and, bein’ young, of course I had to see the sights. A man don’t go to a slave market many times without gittin’ to feel that as far as he is concerned he don’t want nuthin’ to do with buyin’ and sellin’ humans, black or white. Ma, too, she was dead set agin’ it, and she’d said many a time when I was talkin’, “William, if Mr. Douglas don’t really care whether we git to be all slave or not, you oughten to vote for him,” and I’d always said I wouldn’t. Still I couldn’t believe at first but what he did care. By the time the debates was half through I seen it clear enough, though. He didn’t care a red cent--said he didn’t. There was lots of others seen it same as me. I heard more’n one old Democrat say, “Douglas don’t care. Lincoln’s got it right, we’ve got to keep slavery back now or it’s going to spread all over the country.” You never would believe how I felt when I seen that, for that meant goin’ back on Little Dug, leavin’ the party and votin’ for a Black Republican, as we used to call ’em. I tell you when I begun to see where I was goin’ there wa’n’t many nights I didn’t lie awake tryin’ to figure out how I could git around it. ’Twa’n’t long, though, before I got over feelin’ bad. Fact was every time I heard Mr. Lincoln--I used to go to all the speeches between debates, and there must have been twenty or thirty of them--he made it clearer. ’Twas amazin’ how every time he always had some new way of puttin’ it. Seemed as if his head was so full he couldn’t say the same thing twice alike. One thing that made it easier was that I begun to see that Douglas wa’n’t thinkin’ much of anything but gittin elected and that Lincoln wa’n’t thinkin’ about that at all. He was dead set on makin’ us understand. Lots of people seen that the first thing. I recollect how up to Quincy that funny fellow, what do you call him? “Nasby-Petroleum V. Nasby.” Young chap then. Well, he’d come out there for some paper. Wanted to write Lincoln up. It was in the evening after the debate and Mr. Lincoln was settin’ up in his room, at the hotel with his boots off and his feet on a chair--lettin’ ’em breathe, he said. Had his coat and vest off. Nuthin’ on to speak of but his pants and one suspender--settin’ there restin’ and gassin’ with the boys when, as I started to say, Mr. Nasby come up. They had a long talk and I walked down street with him when he left.